As Compass downsizes its IPO, signs of weakness appear for high-growth companies

On the same day that Deliveroo’s IPO fizzled at the start of trading, Compass announced via a fresh S-1 filing that it will reduce the number of shares in its impending flotation and sell them at a lower price.

The move by Compass, a venture-backed residential brokerage, to lower its implied public-market valuation and sell fewer shares is a rebuke of the company’s earlier optimism regarding its valuation and ability to raise capital. The company’s IPO is still slated to generate as much as a half-billion dollars, so it can hardly be called a failure if it executes at its rejiggered price range, but the cuts matter.

Especially when we consider several other factors. The Deliveroo IPO, as discussed this morning, was impacted by more than mere economics. And there are questions regarding how interested seemingly more conservative countries’ stock exchanges will prove in growth-oriented, unprofitable companies.

But added to the mix are recent declines in the valuation of public software companies, effectively repricing the value of high-margin, recurring revenue. The reasons behind that particular change are several, but may include a rotation by public investors into other asset categories, or an air-letting from a sector that may have enjoyed some valuation inflation in the last year.

In that vein, SMB cloud provider DigitalOcean’s own post-IPO declines from its offering price are a bit more understandable, as is a lack of a higher price interval from Kaltura, a video-focused software company, as it looks to list.

Taken together, the various market signs could point to a modest to moderate cooling in the tech IPO market. For a host of companies looking to debut via a SPAC, that could prove to be bad news.